Rhiannon Giddens is ready to meet a major moment of revival in Black music history, with banjo in hand
Rhiannon Giddens is down at the river, carrying a flame of heritage, and she's inviting anyone who wants to join her to come down and light their own wicks.
Rivers are traditionally sites of salvation, as well as play. Last summer, Giddens was making her new album of traditional banjo and fiddle tunes with Justin Robinson, 'What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow,' and they were recording a few songs at Mill Prong House in Red Springs, N.C. Stepping inside the house, built on a plantation in 1795, Giddens recoiled at the intensity she felt.
'I knew who was working these fields,' she says. 'I knew who was serving in this house — and it was people who looked like me. And then seeing up on the wall, like, a reunion photo of these old white dudes who went to Chapel Hill, at the end of the Civil War, and one of them had my Black family's last name from Mebane [N.C.] ... I was just like: I can't right now. I had to run out to the river.'
In a moment captured by a photographer, she was crouching by the water just before it started to rain, 'and I'm thinking: how many people have come down to this river for respite? How many people in the history of this plantation — turned manor house, turned private property — have come to exactly this spot, distressed over whatever reason?'
Giddens carries the weight of this on her shoulders — of the distress, but also of the joyful culture and music-making of her ancestors — and she extends an open invitation to audiences to share and learn their stories and their culture. She did so at her inaugural Biscuits & Banjos Festival in her native North Carolina, and she's doing it in her current Old-Time Revue tour — which will make a special blockbuster stop at the Hollywood Bowl [on June 18].
The program will feature Giddens playing with Hollywood banjoists Steve Martin and Ed Helms, along with a reunion of the all-female banjo supergroup Our Native Daughters. 'So many banjos,' she says. 'This evening is going to be amazing. I wanted to call it a 'Banjo Jamboree,' but they wouldn't let me,' she laughs, speaking to The Times via Zoom.
Balancing laughter and sorrow seems to come easily to Giddens, 48, who has been on a serious mission to rekindle the legacy of the banjo and string band traditions as authentically Black creations ever since she met fiddle player Joe Thompson in 2004 and became a disciple. She's referred to as an 'elder' in the 'Blackbird' liner notes, which doesn't bother her: 'To an 18-year-old, I am an elder,' she says. 'I'm almost 50, and we are the half generation. We're the point five, because our parents didn't pick this up.'
From the Carolina Chocolate Drops to her solo music, from composing the Pulitzer-winning opera 'Omar' to helming the Silkroad Ensemble, Giddens is at the fore of a movement of Black artists — including Beyoncé, whose country album 'Cowboy Carter' features Giddens on banjo — reclaiming their cultural heritage and making it sing again.
A river (of sorts) played a role in another piece of Black Southern iconography this year — in the climax of 'Sinners.' Giddens was a musical consultant on Ryan Coogler's blockbuster film and contributed her banjo to the song 'Old Corn Liquor' on its soundtrack. She was also meant to appear onscreen in the central juke joint — her Chocolate Drops bandmate, Justin Robinson, does — but she couldn't make it work with her busy schedule. She admittedly hasn't seen the film ('I don't like horror movies, so I actually don't want to see it') but she's still a fan.
'I think what they've opened up with the whole conceit behind it is super important,' Giddens says.
In a way, 'Sinners' is a vampiric, IMAX-sized version of her own project, in that it's about how so much of our popular musical culture was invented by Black folks in the South and co-opted by white performers (whether Elvis, the Rolling Stones or the country and folk music industries) — but also about how music can be a time machine, a way to seance with people up the river of history.
'Beyoncé, 'Sinners,' and then, in its own small way, Biscuits & Banjos is like this little triangle of a cultural movement,' Giddens says, 'which I didn't see coming, and I'm just super grateful. Because it's been a desert. ... We're all toiling in our corners, on our own, and it kind of feels like we're carrying all of this on our own.'
Her Durham festival, which took place in April, drew musical legends — Taj Mahal, Christian McBride, the Legendary Ingramettes — and basically 'most of my favorite people making music right now,' says Giddens. She also judged a biscuit competition and participated in contra dances, which is what got her into this music in the first place.
'People were just really ready,' she says, 'ready to come and feel good, and to celebrate our humanity together.'
For Giddens, the stakes couldn't be higher. She and Robinson learned their tunes and their art directly from Thompson, who died in 2012; they were playing his music together in Ojai recently 'when it just hit me how important it was what we were doing,' she says, 'like how complete the sound was together. I said: 'If one of us gets hit by a bus, this tradition is dead.' '
That's why she wanted to record the tunes they inherited from Thompson, as well as from Etta Baker and other North Carolina string band players — hence the 'Blackbird' album. But she also insists that the only way to truly pass the flame is through playing together in person.
'I know that learning from Joe forms the center of my character as a musician,' she says. 'I learned stuff off of recordings, fine, but I have something to go back to that was a living transmission. And I just think you should have something of that, especially in this day and age.'
Giddens has passed her tradition down to many students in the past 20 years, including her nephew Justin 'Demeanor' Harrington — who plays banjo and the bones, and also raps, and who is traveling with her Old-Time Revue.
This will be Giddens' first time at the Bowl; likewise for Amythyst Kiah, a banjo player from Johnson City, Tenn., and one of Our Native Daughters. That project began in 2019 as a one-off album recorded in a small Louisiana studio, of songs inspired by the transatlantic slave trade and the suffering and often unheard voices of Black women.
'Music has a way of disarming,' says Kiah, 'so it allows for people to be able to engage with the subject matter in an easier way than just talking about it.'
The fierce foursome — which also includes Allison Russell and Leyla McCalla — toured with their songs before the pandemic, and later brought their banjos to Carnegie Hall in 2022. 'Now we're playing in a stadium,' says Kiah, 'which is insane.'
The star-studded Bowl show is 'not what I usually do,' says Giddens. 'It's stepping out a little bit for me, not to mention the size of the place, which is kind of freaking me out.'
But really it's just another river — or rather, the same river Giddens has been inviting folks to join her at for the last 20 years.
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'I hope an exhibition like this becomes a bridge,' Widholm told the Chronicle, 'between the kind of intimate relationship we can have with certain kinds of objects and materials in our day-to-day lives.' Widholm sees the project not only as an act of preservation, but also what she calls social justice. 'For me, social justice means acknowledging the humanity of everyone,' Widholm said, adding that art history without African American quilting would be incomplete, exclusionary and simply incorrect. In that sense, the stakes of a show like 'Routed West' are about more than visibility — they're about how history is remembered and whose histories are recorded. 'If we don't make certain decisions to show and give space to certain kinds of artists, they may be forgotten,' Widholm warned, 'or not documented well enough to be discovered in the future.' To counter that risk, the exhibition is accompanied by ample programming. A quilt documentation day on June 28, for instance, invites families to bring quilts to be photographed and recorded, along with oral histories, for inclusion in the national African American Quilt registry to ensure that these stories are not only preserved but actively woven into the broader fabric of American art history.
